Innovations in sport for development and peace research

Abstract

This collection emerged from the Innovations in Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) Research Symposium held in Atlanta, GA, in 2016. The contributors explore new terrain in seeking to further an innovative agenda on SDP within development discourses and practices. The authors provide insights from plural empirical and theoretical domains, including critical, feminist, post-colonial, and cultural studies perspectives. A central goal of this collection is to anticipate, inspire, and shape the next phase of research in, on, and about SDP. A further goal is to connect SDP and development scholarship.

Keywords:

• Sport
• development
• peace
• indicator culture
• governance
• gender

In the fall of 2015, the editors of this collection initiated an open call for papers for a symposium to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, in May 2016. As symposium conveners and editors, our aim was to attract interdisciplinary papers that place investigations of sport, physical activity, and physical culture into deeper conversation with analyses of international development. While the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) sector – and related scholarly analyses – have been flourishing for more than 15 years, both receive little attention from development scholars.¹ Given this state of affairs, this collection seeks to generate new dialogues and explore linkages for development and SDP researchers through considerations of sport’s potential to challenge and/or perpetuate key global issues and problems. This collection includes articles from six contributors to that symposium and two additional contributors, the majority of whom are located in academic fields that foreground the study of sport as an important and culturally complex physical practice.

These scholars argue that the enterprise of the SDP sector requires more critical engagement, suggesting that although sport remains marginal to international development scholars, it is increasingly recognised and promoted by nation-states, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), activists, international organisations, and corporations as a means to address issues of global concern.² Taken together, the papers in this collection provide insights from diverse theoretical and empirical domains, including critical, feminist, post-colonial, and cultural studies perspectives. The authors use ‘sport’ in the broadest sense to cover many aspects of physical culture, including recreational community-based participation and competitive sport at the elite level. While a contested term, SDP has been characterised as the intentional ‘use of sport and physical activity to advance reconciliation and intercultural communication in regions of conflict (“sport for peace”)’ and the use of sport and physical activity to attain specific development objectives, some of which were first identified through the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (also described as ‘sport for development’ or SFD).³

Almost a decade ago, Levermore (2008) asked if sport was becoming the ‘new engine of development’.⁴ Kidd further observed that while development studies scholars have largely overlooked SDP, it ‘has become a recognised strategy of social intervention in disadvantaged communities throughout the world’.⁵ Despite increased visibility, it is important to note that SDP practices are not a recent phenomenon. International organisations like the United Nations and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) first began using sport to reach development-related objectives in the early 1920s.⁶ However, the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of 2000 – and now the Sustainable Development Goals (SGDs) of 2015 – have further served as anchors institutionalising and broadly expanding SDP initiatives. Today, the SDP sector is not necessarily cohesive – indeed, scholars continue to debate whether a unified SDP ‘movement’ exists – particularly as a wide range of stakeholders fall under this umbrella.⁷ From international governmental and NGOs, to multinational corporations and other non-state actors, an assorted array of stakeholders have sought to mobilise sport for a diverse range of interventions including health outcomes, gender equity, the alleviation of poverty, education, community engagement, and other aspects of social welfare.

Initially, the SDP ‘movement’ was presumed to be an effective way of contributing to peace building and social development. However, critical scholarship has challenged the ‘messianic claims’ that sport is a universally beneficial way to usher in ‘First World’ aid and development.⁸ An increasingly robust SDP research agenda has extended beyond monitoring and evaluation (M & E) of project outcomes and has examined the power relations and structural inequalities that underpin both sport and international development. Indeed, a growing body of literature examines the social and political implications of tying sport to development as well as the manner in which sport too frequently perpetuates and sustains contemporary neo-colonial aid relationships.⁹ In addition, a wealth of empirical literature and case studies outline the potential, pitfalls, and limits of SDP initiatives, and highlight the challenge of SDP’s disengagement with broader trends within international development.¹⁰ In response to these concerns, this collection aims to show how development research and SDP may benefit from more purposeful and novel engagements.

Some of the questions animating this collection are: What are the over-arching characteristics of sport for development in relation to the broader field of international development? What globalised governance structures and practices facilitate and enable how SDP programming operates? What frameworks for studying SDP adequately address neo-colonial development legacies? What are the promises and limits of critical pedagogy within SDP? What are the values and limitations of local grassroots development efforts centred on sport? How might SDP research and practice benefit from integrating post-colonial feminist participatory action research approaches? How do SDP practitioners respond to increased demands for M&E practices? The papers offered in this collection do not by any means exhaust these questions, but they do represent the important ways in which SDP needs constant re-examination in the context of geopolitical changes.

The first three essays in this collection are theoretical pieces that draw from broader development approaches to propose new ways of analysing SDP. First, David Black¹¹ examines how scholars of both sport and international development need to better understand the logic of ‘top down’ development approaches that prevail in sport for development and how changes can be made for more socially inclusive and sustainable SFD. Simon Darnell and Michael Dao¹² offer a suggestive and generative signposting of how political and developmental theory might be engaged within the field of SDP. In particular, they explore Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach as a way to theorise sport’s potential contributions to the current policies and practices that fall under the SDP banner. In the US context, Mary McDonald’s¹³ paper offers an analysis of the post-9/11 development agenda and the mobilisation of Title IX, the 1972 US legal mandate requiring equity within educational settings including sport. Specifically, her work critically explores the ideologies of security promoted globally through the US State Department’s ‘Empowering Women and Girls Through Sports’ programme.

The next series of articles focus on SDP fieldwork across many parts of the world, including Australasia, Columbia, Nicaragua, Canada, and the southern US. Turning once more to the US context, Kate Diedrick and Christopher Le Dantec¹⁴ interrogate the impact of sport mega-development on predominantly African-American neighbourhoods in Atlanta, Georgia. Their paper offers insight regarding how sport mega-development projects often reproduce historical and global patterns of poverty and disenfranchisement as well as possibilities for community-wide political engagement. Kathryn Henne¹⁵ draws from ethnographic work conducted at the United Nations and in Australasia and the Pacific to examine how SDP programming is created and negotiated by networks of different actors – both human and non-human – that contribute to the governance of SDP. Her article offers an analysis of the ways in which indictor culture, specifically the growing reliance on quantified measurement tools, implicates SDP networks. The focus on measurement tools also drives Megan Chawansky and Alison Carney’s¹⁶ examination of what gets measured and counted in SDP monitoring and evaluation, and why. Their paper moves the argument about indicator culture into new territory by revealing the lack of discussion on pleasure that exists in research on and about girls in SfD.

Sarah Oxford and Ramon Spaaij¹⁷ draw on ethnographic research conducted in two marginalised neighbourhoods in two major cities in Columba. This paper examines how critical pedagogy transpires and how donor-NGO relations affect the experience of SDP practitioners and participants. The collection concludes with Lyndsay Hayhurst’s¹⁸ article, which sheds light on the use of visual research methods guided by a post-colonial-feminist participatory action research (PFPAR) approach. Hayhurst uses a range of participatory methodological platforms – including photovoice, photocollaging, and digital storytelling with urban Aboriginal women in Canada and rural Nicaraguan young women – to amplify important issues, while critically questioning and discussing the ways in which SDP research can benefit from integrating participatory feminist post-colonial approaches.

Collectively, these articles help to paint a picture about the complicated ways in which sport is represented and used within development agendas in spaces across the globe. More importantly, they build upon and extend existing scholarship in this area in an effort to anticipate, inspire, and shape the next phase of innovative research in, on, and about SDP.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the Sports, Society, and Technology programme at the Georgia Institute of Technology through a research symposium held in May 2016.

Notes on contributors

Megan Chawansky is a lecturer and the assistant director of the Centre for Sport Diplomacy at the University of Kentucky. Prior to this, she served as a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton (UK) where she taught on the postgraduate degree in sport for international development (SfD) and on the undergraduate sport studies degree. Her research and consultancy experiences in the area of SfD include work with partners in India, Zambia, and the Caribbean. She also served as a Programme Coordinator for PeacePlayers International Cyprus from 2008 to 2009. She is a co-editor (with Dr Lyndsay M.C. Hayhurst and Professor Tess Kay) of the edited collection: Beyond Sport for Development and Peace: Transnational perspectives on theory, policy and practice (2016). Her academic work has appeared in the following journals: Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, Sport in Society and International Review for the Sociology of Sport.

Lyndsay Hayhurst is an assistant professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Science at York University in Toronto, Canada. Her research interests include sport for development and peace (SDP), gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health in/through SDP, cultural studies of girlhood, post-colonial feminist theory, global governance, international relations and corporate social responsibility. She is a co-editor (with Tess Kay and Megan Chawansky) of Beyond Sport for Development and Peace: Transnational perspectives on theory, policy and practice, and her publications have appeared in Women’s Studies International Forum; Gender, Place & Culture; Third World Quarterly and Sociology of Sport Journal. Her current research focuses on: (1) the use of non-human objects and technologies in SDP; and (2) how the politics of privatised aid provided by the extractives sector shapes domestic SDP interventions that target Indigenous youth in Canada and Australia. She has previously worked for the United Nations Development Programme and Right to Play.

Mary G. McDonald is the Homer C. Rice Chair in Sports and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A past president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport, she has published more than 40 refereed articles and book chapters and co-edited Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation, an important work in the field which earned a Choice award as a top academic title. Her research focuses on American culture and sport including issues of inequality as related to gender, race, class, and sexuality. She has edited special issues of the Sociology of Sport Journal devoted to ‘(Post)Identity and Sport’ and ‘Whiteness and Sport’ and is a frequent speaker on these and other subjects in professional forums and other venues. She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Sociology of Sport Association (ISSA) serving a term (2016–2019) as vice president in charge of communications. As Homer C. Rice Chair, she is directing the new Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts initiative in Sports, Society, and Technology.

Cathy van Ingen is an associate professor in the Department of Kinesiology at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Her research interests include sport for development and peace, gender-based violence, boxing and combat sports, sport media and media activism. She is the founder and director of Shape Your Life (SYL) a free, non-contact boxing programme in Toronto for female-identified individuals who have experienced violence. Her academic work has appeared in the following journals: Sociology of Sport Journal, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, and the Journal of Sport History.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express a sincere thank you to all the contributors to this collection and to acknowledge the invaluable help of the peer reviewers for their advice, feedback and substantial engagement with individual contributions. We would also like to thank the participants at the Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) Research Symposium sponsored by the Sports, Society, and Technology programme at the Georgia Institute of Technology in May 2016. Finally, we are grateful to the Third World Thematics editorial team especially Madeleine Hatfield, Journal Manager of TWT, for their assistance with the volume.

Notes

1. Darnell and Black, “Mainstreaming Sport into International.”

2. Kidd, “Cautions, Questions and Opportunities.”

3. Kidd, “A New Social Movement,” 372–3.

4. Levermore, “Sport: A New Engine.”

5. Kidd, “Cautions, Questions and Opportunities,” 603.

6. See note 2 above.

7. See Kidd, “A New Social Movement.”

8. Coalter, “The Politics of Sport-For-Development”; and Kidd, “Cautions, Questions and Opportunities.”

9. Darnell, Sport for Development and Peace.

10. Lindsey, “Governance in Sport-for-development.”

11. Black, “The Challenge of Articulating.”

12. Darnell and Dao, “Considering ‘Sport for Development and Peace’.”

13. McDonald, “Traveling Discourses of Title IX.”

14. Diedrick and Le Dantec, “Atlanta’s Westside Residents Challenge.”

15. Henne, “Indicator Culture in Sport.”

16. Chawansky and Carney, “The Politics of Pleasure in Girl-centred.”

17. Oxford and Spaaij, “Critical Pedagogy and Power Relations.”

18. Hayhurst, “Image-ining Resistance: Using Participatory.”